When Museums go into crisis

The international financial crisis is now being felt in the museum sector. Visitor numbers are falling in traditional attractions in Rome, Tivoli, Florence, Pompeii and Mantova with an average drop of 2.5% across Italy. However if we look carefully at the reasons for our crisis, you can quickly see the problem lies in the fact that current museum, exhibition and archaeological structures are not keeping pace with the times.

Having woken up after many years of slumber, policy makers and those responsible for individual works have finally started to rethink museum organisation to make them more magnetising for the market. Even with the absence of a complete strategy to re-launch the touristic-cultural sector, the time has come to break out of the four dusty walls of the “classic” museum and risk more competitive, open and innovative solutions that are able to bring together archaeological artefacts and paintings with the most cutting edge technology.
Bringing enlightenment to what is behind a work of art and not solely showing it as oil and canvas or stone means preparing a kind of parallel exhibition that fractures the rigidity of the same old labelling by accompanying it with nostalgia on the artist, maybe even performances, and most definitely the inter-activeness and unpredictability of blogs on chat forums. In recent years it is not by chance that museums which have opened virtual galleries, accessible from every part of the planet get millions of hits each year. The Vatican Museums, The MART in Rovereto, Tate Britain in London and the MoMA in New York all have effective interactive web presence and enjoy success.
Managing facilitate dialogue with visitors who do not only “observe”, getting close to their needs and launching more open promotion policies means creating new and desirable spaces that are able to accommodate ever increasing numbers and offer the treasures of our country a rebirth.